After lunch I finally took off to make my way east. My goal for the day was Shelby. I walked about 5 miles to get myself truly outside of town, and started hitchhiking. After a relatively short wait, I was picked up by Eric, in his pickup truck. He drove me to the road's intersection with US-2, where there was a large gas station, and I hitchhiked from there.
After 30 minutes or so, Jay and Heather picked me up. They drove me (meandered, really) through the Rockies on US-2, just skirting the edge of Glacier National Park. It would've been nice to actually drive through the park, but that road was closed due to avalanches -- it had snowed a few days previously. We stopped in the middle of the crossing to eat lunch at a small diner in the middle of nowhere, and then we were off again. They dropped me off at East Glacier, on the eastern side of the Rockies, which was about 20 miles farther than they'd planned on going. They had said they'd drop me off at Essex, but somehow we never saw it even though they'd been there before and were watching for it.
When they dropped me off it was 5:45 or so. I used the bathroom at the gas station, had a quick bite to eat, and hitchhiked from 6:00 to 8:30, but everyone who stopped for me was going to Browning. Several people had already told me not to get stuck there at night. I didn't have faith that I'd be able to get a ride out that late in the day, so I turned all those rides down.
At 8:30 it was starting to get dark, so I decided to find my spot to sleep for the night. Unfortunately, the area around East Glacier had been cleared of trees, so to get to a good camping spot would have taken a westward walk of a mile or so. I decided to wander around until the nightly Amtrak had come through, and then head up to the station. After the train passed, I watched the station (which I could see because it was about 15 feet higher than the rest of the town, at the same level as the railroad tracks) for activity to die down. When I could see that there was no one left there, I went up, put down my mattress pad, laid out my sleeping bag, and went to sleep. I didn't sleep well though, because a couple times people walked through and late at night quite a few freight trains passed.
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